I do kernel work for instance and installing the giant nVidia blob every time I want to use a new kernel (4-6 times a day sometimes) is a pain. Plus, the nVidia drivers are often not compatible with mainline kernel. nVidia has only excuses for not participating in nouveau development, I just wish there was an alternative for gaming that wasn't ATI.

I do kernel work for instance and installing the giant nVidia blob every time I want to use a new kernel (4-6 times a day sometimes) is a pain. Plus, the nVidia drivers are often not compatible with mainline kernel. nVidia has only excuses for not participating in nouveau development, I just wish there was an alternative for gaming that wasn't ATI.

Never use the same OS for developing and everyday stuff/gaming. Dual boot or use virtual machines. This a very basic thing...

Nouveau for gaming: Reclocking is still not quite there. Until then, forget games with nouveau.

ATI: ATI has been dead for 6 years. Some people are slow. Think of it this way: If you had a child when the ATI brand was put to rest, that child would already be going to school...

Some people spend $500+ on a GPU. Using a Nouveau driver with that kind of hardware would be like using homemade fuel in your Ferrari. Just don't do it. It might kind of work but the performance will be ♥♥♥♥ compared to the real thing and you may actually cause damage.

According to Phoronix tests, Nouveau can be usable (and it has been benchmarked with Steam games), but only on a limited selection of GPUs, and even then the performance is not great. With the GTX 650, the latest drivers and kernel, and manual reclocking, you can get ~55-60% of the frame rate that is possible with the proprietary driver, this seems to be the best case. However, others are not quite as good and may have up to 5-10 times worse performance if the reclocking does not work, and there is no usable support yet for the new Maxwell GPUs. The proprietary OpenGL driver is also likely to be more stable and have less compatibility issues with games.